St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

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St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

CoCo, hit local coworking provider, spreading to Uptown

Coworking was an unfamiliar concept for most Twin Cities workers when CoCo opened its doors in downtown St. Paul in January 2010.

CoCo co-founder Don Ball recalls having to sell prospective customers on the notion of a communal workspace that is more affordable than traditional office space, not to mention more social and collaborative for all concerned.

Since then, the coworking scene has exploded in Minnesota. CoCo’s newer, much larger space in downtown Minneapolis is at capacity, and other coworking spaces have popped up in the Twin Cities and elsewhere in the state.

Now CoCo (short for “coworking and collaborative space”) is expanding again.

It plans to open an Uptown location in mid-September with a number of unique amenities, including a movie theater, a tap room, a pool room, and a big open space in the back for companies of every stripe to jointly engage in product prototyping and strategic planning.

The new spot at 1010 W. Lake St. will take pressure off the close-to-bursting location in Minneapolis’ former Grain Exchange, Ball said, and potentially tap into a fresh breed of customer who rarely ventures into the downtowns.

“It’s getting really dense down there” in Uptown, he said. “And by heading into a different neighborhood, we’ll run into characters we’ve never met before.”

The new locale, adjacent to the greenway for convenient cyclist access, will even include an outdoor patio and garden that is very much in the Uptown vein but exclusive to CoCo users, Ball said.

A stylish indoor lounge, one of six meeting areas, also is in the works. The theater uses old seats from the Uptown Theatre, which was remodeled.

The Uptown outpost at about 15,000 square feet is smaller than the 20,000-square-foot Minneapolis location, but larger than 12,000-square-foot St. Paul locale.

CoCo in Uptown will fill up an old car-repair shop adjacent to an existing CVS pharmacy. The building owner approached Ball and co-founder Kyle Coolbroth, who have also been wooed by suburban landlords.

The St. Paul location hasn’t seen wild success like its Minneapolis counterpart, but is the home base for a number of nonprofits and is generally pretty busy, Ball said.

About 50 percent of those who use the Minneapolis space are in the technology industry, with about 40 percent in creative fields.

That location has a long waiting list for its “campsites,” a cluster of semi-permanent work areas that small companies call home. Generally, finding a spot to sit and work there can be a challenge, even for individuals using the rows of first-come first-served workstations, Ball said.

CoCo’s Minneapolis location gets seven new sign-ups for every customer who leaves, he noted. Coffee consumption is up 100 percent from a year ago with workers going through eight to 10 pounds of CoCo’s special blend a day, he added.

The Silicon Valley-based Google tech giant gave CoCo a huge boost when it held events in Minneapolis, and sponsored nearly two dozen others entrepreneurship-themed events that drew more than 4,000 people to the grand old Grain Exchange.

This has been a remarkable ascent for CoCo, which seemed all but doomed shortly after it launched in 2010.

Light-rail construction started just outside, “and the building shook every day,” said Ball. “We thought we had made a terrible mistake.”

What’s more, “No one (in the Twin Cities) woke up with a coworking need,” he said. “We had to convince people.”